the age of the earlier dynasties a wholly different type, of which the
famous wooden statue now in the Cairo Museum, and commonly known as the
"Shêkh el-Beled," may be taken as an illustration. Here the skull is
round instead of long, the lips and nostrils are thick and fleshy, the
expression good-humoured rather than intellectual. The type is that of a
portion of the lower classes, and disappears from the monuments after
the fall of the Sixth dynasty. After that epoch the races which
inhabited Egypt were more completely fused together, and the rounded
skull became rare.

Egyptian history begins with Menes, the founder of the united monarchy,
and of the First historical dynasty. Our glimpses of the age that
preceded him--the age of the followers of Horus, as the Egyptians termed
it--are few and scanty. Egypt was divided into several kingdoms, which
were gradually unified into two only, those of the north and the south.
The northern kingdom was symbolised by the snake and papyrus, the
southern kingdom by the vulture and aloe. The vulture was the emblem of
Nekheb, the goddess of the great fortress whose ruins are now called
El-Kab; and it is probable that the city of Nekhen, which stood opposite
it on the western bank of the Nile, was once the capital of the south.
However this may be, when Menes mounted the throne he was hereditary
ruler of This, a city which adjoined the sacred burial-place of Osiris
at Abydos, and of which Girgeh is the modern successor.

Menes made himself master of the north, and so united all Egypt under
one rule. He then undertook and carried through a vast engineering work,
one of the greatest the world has ever seen. The Nile was turned aside
out of its old channel under the Libyan cliffs into a new channel to the
east. The dyke which forced the river from its old course still remains,
and two or three thousand years before the bed of the valley had risen